Columns By Steven Novella, M.D.
September 22, 2005
Weird Scientology: Tom Cruise is bad for your mental health.
Scientology spiritual home of Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman and a lot of Hollywood actors you've never heard ofhas gotten a lot of press for what some say is its cult-like devotion to secrecy, not to mention its hefty charges for counseling services. (See "Battlefield New Haven," Nov. 4, 2004, newhavenadvocate.com.) But it's not Scientology's recruiting strategies, nor its finances, that could cause the most harm; from the point of view of public nuisance, what's most worrying is Scientology's opposition to anti-depressants, and its general denial of chemical imbalances in the brain and organic mental illness. Take, for example, Tom Cruise's public spat with Brooke Shields last summer, as he derided her use of anti-depressants to cope with post-partum depression.
August 18, 2005
Fear Not: Vaccinations don't give children autism.
One of the most memorable scenes in The Big Lebowski, the classic 1998 Coen Brothers movie starring Jeff Bridges as "the Dude," is when Walter Sobchak, played with overweight aplomb by John Goodman, shows up at the house of the young boy he believes stole the Dude's car. Little Larry is, it turns out, the son of one Arthur Digby Sellers, a serial writer from the early days of television who happens to have written one of Sobchak's favorite shows. But Sobchak can't exactly address Arthur, not to his face anyway, because Arthur resides at the far end of the living room in an iron lung.
August 11, 2005
Goodbye, Mr. No-Chips!
Historians like to have singular events as milestones along the meandering byways of time. Two years ago, Dr. Robert C. Atkins, founder of the Atkins diet and the recognized guru of the low-carb dieting craze, died of injuries sustained in a fall. At the time, however, not too many people noticed; the peak in the popularity of his diet was still a year away.
July 14, 2005
Cereal Killers: Its crop circle season. How ridiculous.
Just last year, a "crop circle" (actually a crop square) appeared in Martha Bailey's cornfield in New Milford, Conn. Her field is surrounded by a 7-foot-tall fence of chicken wire and wood. Overnight, in the middle of the field, a "perfect" square of flattened down corn appeared. According to Martha, "Everything was secure, the gates were locked, [so] it had to be something that touched down and flattened it."
June 2, 2005
Levitating Frogs: Or, why theres no such thing as free energy.
When I was a child some of my favorite toys were simple magnets. I was fascinated by the way they could push or pull on each other at a distance with an invisible force. It was like magic. Energy itself, all types of energy, seems like magic. Physicists, performing almost like stage magicians (nothing up their sleeves), recently delighted in showing off how they could levitate frogs using superconducting magnets.
May 5, 2005
Natural Born Shillers: There's nothing so great about being all natural.
While grocery shopping recently, I noticed that the chicken I was buying was cleanly wrapped in plastic adorned with a label that informed me the chicken was "all natural," and that it was not made from any artificial ingredients. I was happy to learn that I was not buying an artificial chicken. Chances are your medicine cabinet, refrigerator, bathroom and cupboard shelves are also filled with products whose labels comfortingly reassure that they are "all natural" and free from anything "artificial." Marketing experts go to great lengths to ensure their strategies reflect the attitudes of their customers, and from a marketing point of view, natural = good, artificial = bad.
March 17, 2005
Fear Itself: What are the real risks of vaccinating--or not vaccinating--your children?
The disaster genre of film owes much of its popularity to the basic human dramas it presents. Each such film has a predictable cast of characters, from the practical hero to the greedy villain. My favorite, however, is the hapless hysteric: the person who ignores the sound advice of the hero and, motivated by terror, dashes directly to his or her doom. The moral is clear: Fear will help you survive, but hysterical terror will get you killed.
February 17, 2005
Look, Up There!: Could UFOs be for real?
I once saw a UFO. That is, I saw an object in the sky I couldn't identify. Chances are you have too, probably more than once. What I saw were lights in a large "V" shape, moving silently, too slow to be a plane, moving out of view after about 10 minutes. Was it a flying saucer, and alien spacecraft, a time-traveling psychic Bigfoot, or perhaps something more prosaic--something boring?
January 27, 2005
Fad-Diet Follies: Why Atkins and its ilk are for suckers.
How is that low-carb diet working out for you? Perhaps you are on a low-fat diet, or you may be using a meal-substitution plan, going to a support group, or taking a dieting supplement. By now it's no news flash that Americans are fat, and we are getting fatter. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and this new epidemic is spreading to every demographic, even the young.
December 23, 2004
Psychic Secrets Revealed! How to win friends and cheat people.
At a recent medical conference, a pharmaceutical company was offering free handwriting analysis--for "entertainment" of course. Always game, I agreed to have the depths of my personality laid bare, betrayed by the sweep of my s and the boldness of my t . To my skeptical eye, the results were laughably mundane and predictable. The reader knew, of course, that I was a physician, so it was no surprise when he "read" in my handwriting that I like science and have a desire to care for people. Wow!
November 25, 2004
Alien Abductions and Coffee Enemas: Or, the problem with being open-minded.
II listened patiently as the UFO enthusiast explained how humans were transplanted to the earth from another world by our alien forebears.
"Then how do you explain the fact that humans share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and a genetic code will all life on earth?" I asked.
"Well, I think you have to keep an open mind," was her starry-eyed response.
October 28, 2004
Evolve This: Is there an alternative to the theory of evolution?
There are different versions of the dangerous error known as creationism. "Young earth" creationists believe the world was created ten thousand years ago in six days; others gallantly admit the earth is older. But all creationists deny one scientific fact: Life on earth is the product of evolution, slow change over time brought about primarily by natural selection acting on variation.
September 30, 2004
An Idea Whose Time Has Gone: Homeopathy is bunk, says our new resident skeptic.
Pearl Street is home to one of New Haven's lesser known academic institutions, the School of Homeopathy. There you can learn a 200-year-old system of "medicine" invented by German physician Samuel Hahnemann, who believed that toxic substances, if given in extremely diluted amounts, would cure the same symptoms that in higher doses they cause--for example, that a minute dose of caffeine could cure insomnia. |
